Walmart Closes Vibe.co Acquisition, AI Assistants Gain Traction: 6 Commerce Media Moves

The Week’s Commerce Media Deals: Vibe.co, AI Assistants, and Criteo’s Guidance Cut

Commerce media networks are accelerating their push into streaming, AI-driven shopping, and personalised creative formats, as a flurry of announcements this week showed. Walmart closed its acquisition of adtech firm Vibe.co, giving its Walmart Connect division new tools to link retail data with streaming television inventory and compete head-on with Amazon for full-funnel ad budgets. At the same time, Best Buy promoted Marty Senn to chief marketing officer—a role previously held by Jennie Weber—signalling a possible shift toward more brand-building and storytelling, given Senn’s creative agency background at Carmichael Lynch and Goodby Silverstein & Partners.

Elsewhere, a partnership between Dick’s Sporting Goods, LiveRamp, and Adobe targets the long-standing challenge of delivering personalised creative at scale, while Amazon, Albertsons, and Walmart itself are rolling out richer ad formats. On the AI front, Michaels reported that its Google-powered shopping assistant converts at roughly twice the rate of traditional search, and Kroger expanded its AI assistant across digital platforms, suggesting conversational commerce is now generating real sales, not just pilots. 7-Eleven, meanwhile, teamed with Ibotta to launch a performance-based promotions platform across more than 11,500 7-Eleven and Speedway stores, tapping into a loyalty ecosystem of over 100 million members.

The week’s news wasn’t uniformly positive: adtech vendor Criteo posted a 11% year-over-year revenue decline to $428 million and cut its full-year guidance, though it highlighted a promising revenue stream—2,000 brands have purchased ChatGPT ads through its platform, with conversion rates 1.5 to 2 times higher than traditional search traffic.

Why Retail Media Is Moving Beyond Sponsored Products

Walmart Connect vs. Amazon: The Streaming Ad Play

The Vibe acquisition transforms Walmart’s ability to serve dynamic, data-driven video ads on connected TV, closing a gap with Amazon’s own streaming advertising business. By fusing first-party purchase data with programmatic TV inventory, Walmart Connect can now offer advertisers closed-loop measurement linking ad exposure to in-store and online sales—a capability that has become table stakes in the competition for CPG and retail ad dollars. This move directly pressures other retail media networks to accelerate their own streaming strategies or risk losing high-margin ad budgets.

AI Shopping Assistants Move from Hype to Revenue Driver

Michaels’ claim of a 2x conversion uplift with its AI assistant is a concrete data point that conversational commerce works. Kroger’s expansion—and its willingness to share the news—reinforces the message that AI-powered product discovery is shifting from experiment to core digital experience. For brands, this changes the retail media brief: promotional tactics must soon be optimised for natural-language queries rather than just keyword search, with product content, reviews, and pricing data likely playing a larger role in how those assistants rank results.

The Creative Arms Race in Retail Media

The Dick’s–LiveRamp–Adobe partnership and the broader push for richer ad formats signal that retailers are realising standard sponsored product listings are commoditised. The next phase is about personalising creative at scale—delivering the right video, interactive unit, or branded content based on a shopper’s purchase history. While it lowers the barrier for brands to run full campaigns, it also places new demands on creative production pipelines and data-sharing agreements between retailers, tech providers, and advertisers.

Criteo’s Guidance Cut and the OpenAI Lifeline

Criteo’s 11% revenue decline and lowered outlook reflect broader pressures on legacy retargeting models as third-party cookies phase out and retail media networks build direct relationships. The ChatGPT partnership, however, offers a glimpse into a post-cookie future: if AI-mediated search becomes a major shopping entry point, Criteo’s role as an ad conduit between intent-driven queries and brands could offset its legacy erosion. But with only 2,000 brands currently on the platform, this revenue stream is nascent and far from compensating for the core business decline.

Performance Promotions at Scale: 7-Eleven’s Bet

The Ibotta partnership gives 7-Eleven a turnkey way to run digital CPG offer campaigns tied to real-time purchase data, something that convenience stores—with their high footfall but fragmented loyalty data—have historically struggled to do. For CPG brands, it represents a new, measurable performance channel with the potential for granular targeting, though the promotional lift will depend on how seamlessly the offers integrate into the existing 7Rewards experience.

What Retailers, Brands, and Advertisers Should Watch Next

• For retail media executives: Walmart’s streaming integration sets a new competitive bar. If you’re not currently piloting connected TV formats that connect ad exposures to own-channel sales, your network risks losing budget to those that can offer end-to-end attribution—plan a streaming roadmap within the next two quarters.
• For digital marketing teams at CPG and retail brands: Michaels’ 2x conversion rate on AI shopping assistants should trigger an immediate audit of your product feeds and content readiness for conversational commerce. Optimise product descriptions, visual assets, and pricing data now, because Kroger’s expansion suggests this channel will scale faster than many expect.
• For ad buyers using Criteo: The reduced full-year outlook signals that Criteo’s legacy retargeting business is under structural pressure. Consider diversifying budget toward retail media networks with strong organic first-party data connections, while also testing the ChatGPT ad format—its 1.5x–2x higher conversion rate could provide near-term efficiency gains, but don’t bet your plan on it until monthly active-user scale is clearer.
• For convenience and loyalty programme operators: 7-Eleven’s Ibotta deal shows how a turnkey performance promotions platform can activate a 100-million-member base. If you operate a loyalty program with similar scale, evaluate whether a third-party offer platform could unlock new CPG dollars without a lengthy in-house build.
• For marketing leaders following Best Buy’s CMO change: Marty Senn’s creative agency pedigree may signal a pivot toward brand storytelling in Best Buy’s holiday campaigns. Agencies and media partners should prepare for more brand-led briefs and a possible rebalance away from purely transactional performance marketing at the electronics chain.